Issue one in regard to the Confederation Navy, can be resolved by placing them into five kay tonne non frontline ships to coordinate escort flotillas.

Issue two, the command brdiges can be built for a five kay tonne hull with all it's associated cost (thirty seven and a half million credits), and then just install it on any other ship, or even dirtside.

An interesting solution occurred to me: you take two docking clamps, and attach them to each other, plus a large enough battery to operate them, thus creating a bridge without using up tonnage on hull modules.

Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
"It’s sort of like the way modern computer systems are set up."

ERIC BERGER - 2/8/2018, 3:20 PM

Enlarge / The Falcon Heavy rocket proved that 27 engines can fly together and not go all explode-y.

One of the most striking aspects of this week's launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket is the number of engines the triple-core booster used to reach orbit. Each of the cores had nine Merlin rocket engines, making for a total of 27 engines.

Prior to this launch, no rocket had ever successfully ascended into orbit with more than nine engines—a feat accomplished previously by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Rocket Lab's Electron rocket. (The Russian Soyuz rocket has five engines, each of which has six thrust chambers.)

This may be the moment SpaceX opened the cosmos to the masses
Launching a rocket with 27 engines, therefore, represents a notable step forward in rocket complexity. It is all the more so, considering the Soviet N-1 rocket. Four times, from 1969 to 1972, the Russians attempted to launch their titanic “Moon rocket,” and it failed spectacularly each time. Its 30 engines were just too many to fire, throttle, and steer at the same time.

During an interview with SpaceX founder Elon Musk this week prior to launch, Ars asked Musk if the history of the N-1 rocket concerned him. "No," he replied. "I think with the N-1 failure it was mostly avionics failure. They had engine to engine fire issues." Five decades later, SpaceX could do better.

Like a computer

The company's development of the Falcon 9 rocket, with nine engines, had given Musk confidence that SpaceX could scale up to 27 engines in flight, and he believed this was a better overall solution for the thrust needed to escape Earth's gravity. To explain why, the former computer scientist used a computer metaphor.

"It’s sort of like the way modern computer systems are set up," Musk said. "With Google or Amazon they have large numbers of small computers, such that if one of the computers goes down it doesn’t really affect your use of Google or Amazon. That’s different from the old model of the mainframe approach, when you have one big mainframe and if it goes down, the whole system goes down."

For computers, Musk said, using large numbers of small computers ends up being a more efficient, smarter, and faster approach than using a few larger, more powerful computers. So it was with rocket engines. "It’s better to use a large number of small engines," Musk said. With the Falcon Heavy rocket, he added, up to half a dozen engines could fail and the rocket would still make it to orbit.

The flight of the Falcon Heavy likely bodes well for SpaceX's next rocket, the much larger Big Falcon Rocket (or BFR), now being designed at the company's Hawthorne, California-based headquarters. This booster will use 31 engines, four more than the Falcon Heavy. But it will also use larger, more powerful engines. The proposed Raptor engine has 380,000 pounds of thrust at sea level, compared to 190,000 pounds of thrust for the Merlin 1-D engine.

“It gives me a lot of faith for our next architecture," Musk said Tuesday night, after the Falcon Heavy's launch. "It gives me confidence that BFR is really quite workable.”

How do spacecraft navigate in space over billions of kilometers and with split second timing during missions that last for years or decades. Here we look at how its done and the underlying principles that make it all possible.

In nuclear fusion may lie the key to many of the world's energy problems. CBC's Frédéric Zalac sizes up some of the players that are working hard to master it, including General Fusion — a small Canadian company based out of a Burnaby, B.C. warehouse.

Light fighters are fighter aircraft towards the low end of the practical range of weight, cost, and complexity over which fighters are fielded. The term lightweight fighter is more commonly used in the modern literature, and by example tends to imply somewhat more capable aircraft than light fighters at the lower practical ranges, but the terms overlap and are sometimes used interchangeably.[a][b.] Whatever term is used, the concept is to be on the generally lower half of the practical range, but still with carefully selected competitive features, in order to project highly effective force per unit of budget via an efficient design.[1][c]
As well-designed lightweight fighters have proven able to match or beat heavier aircraft plane-for-plane for many missions,[2][3][4][5] and to significantly excel them in budgetary efficiency,[6] light/lightweight fighters have proven to be a strategically valuable concept.[7] Attempting to scale this efficiency to still lower cost, some manufacturers have in recent years adopted the term “light fighter” to also refer to light primarily air-to-ground attack aircraft, some of which are modified trainer designs.
A key design goal of light/lightweight fighter design is to satisfy standard air-to-air fighter effectiveness requirements. These criteria, in order of importance, are the ability to benefit from the element of surprise, to have numerical superiority in the air, to have superior maneuverability, and to possess suitable weapon systems effectiveness.[8][9][10][11][12] Light fighters typically achieve a surprise advantage over larger aircraft due to smaller visual and radar signatures, which is important since in the majority of air-to-air kills, the element of surprise is dominant.[13][14][15] Their comparative lower cost and higher reliability also allows for greater numbers per budget.[16] Finally, while a single engine light fighter would typically only carry about half the weapons load of a heavy twin engine fighter, its surprise and maneuverability advantages often allow it to gain positional advantage to make better use of those weapons.
A requirement for small and therefore low cost fighters first arose in the period between World War I and World War II. Examples include several RAF interceptor designs from the interwar era and French "Jockey" aircraft of the immediate pre-World War II. None of these very light fighters enjoyed success into World War II, as they were too hampered in performance. Similar to the meaning of lightweight fighter today, during World War II the term “small fighter” was used to describe a single engine aircraft of competitive performance, range, and armament load, but with no unnecessary weight and cost.[17]
After World War II fighter design moved into the jet era, and many jet fighters basically followed the successful World War II formula of highly efficient mostly single engine designs that tended to be about half the weight and cost of twin engine heavy fighters. Prominent early examples include the English Folland Gnat, the American F-86 Sabre and Northrop F-5, the Soviet Mikoyan MiG-15 and Mikoyan MiG-21, the French Mirage III, and the Swedish Saab Draken. More modern lightweight fighters with competitive air-to-air capability (supersonic aircraft with afterburning engines and modern missile armament) include the American F-16 Fighting Falcon, Swedish JAS 39 Gripen, Indian HAL Tejas, Korean FA-50, Japanese Mitsubishi F-2, Chinese Chengdu J-10, and Chinese CAC/PAC JF-17 Thunder. The high practical and budgetary effectiveness of modern light fighters for many missions is why the US Air Force adopted both the F-15 Eagle and F-16 in a "hi/lo" strategy of both an outstanding but expensive heavy fighter and a lower cost but also outstanding lightweight fighter.[18] The investment to maintain a competitive modern lightweight fighter air force is approximately $90M to $130M (2013 dollars) per plane over a 20-year service life, which is approximately half the cost of heavy fighters,[d] so understanding fighter aircraft design trade-offs and combat effectiveness is of national level strategic importance.

Is there surprise in space?

My criteria would be:

1. Size

2. Price

3. Kreis

4. Fries

5. Wise

1. Size is a question of volume, which affects visibility, maneuverability and price. The rules don't provide a default hull below ten tonnes, and only from fifty tonnes onwards, is size an issue to targetting.

2. Price seems more effected by electronics than size and scaleability.

3. Manoeuvrability isn't effected until fifty tonnes.

4. Is one weapon slot enough? You get two by thirty five tonnes.

5. This issue always crops up when arguing about the cost of the Lightninged Too; undoubtedly the case if you equip it with bleeding edge electronics and sensors in the early prototype stage, which shouldn't be the case for light fighters.